Major Thomas Jones and the Whaling Island
Near Jones Beach, New York
The barrier island that Robert Moses transformed into a public beach took its name from a man who arrived on Long Island two hundred years before Moses was born. Major Thomas Jones first came to Long Island in sixteen ninety two. By most accounts he was born in Ireland and made his way to the American colonies, and established himself as a landowner in the Massapequa area on the south shore.
He may have built the first brick house on Long Island. Around the year seventeen hundred, Thomas Jones constructed a whaling station on the narrow barrier island that bears his name today. Whaling was among the most profitable industries of colonial Long Island.
The nutrient-rich offshore waters of the Atlantic supported large whale populations, and the barrier islands provided useful staging points for the boats and crews that hunted them. Jones's whaling operation is recorded in the local history of the period, and though the station itself has long since disappeared under centuries of storm and tide, his name endured in the landscape through all the changes that followed. For more than two centuries after Jones's era, the island remained largely undeveloped, a narrow strip of dune grass and sand beaten by Atlantic weather, until the dredges arrived in the late nineteen twenties and remade it entirely.
